Is Intel committed to Meego? It's "hard to say"

And here is the second and final part of this year’s Top of The Cebit Pops, how very exciting!

Get ready to boogie, swing and obscenely move your pelvis about new products from the ITC industry! Well, actually not, as there simply is not all that much to lose one’s head over.

TechEye managed to talk to AMD and Intel in Hangover sorry Hannover and see what stuff was coming up. This year it was decided Meego would be an interesting topic so we decided to have a chat with Intel’s Peter Biddle, a rather likeable chap who heads Chipzilla’s AppUp department.

Biddle confirmed Meego products were up-and coming, although no tablets were on display apart from the WeTab no one wants to use. However, Asus has officially announced a Meego netbook, confirming the rumours that birds were chirping last week.

Asked about Intel’s commitment to Meego, Biddle stated it was hard to say Intel was totally 100 percent committed for the next few years. Nonetheless, telcos want a third platform and ecosystem, one over which they can exercise control. Intel is trying to fulfill that desire, after all no operator wants to stay a dumb pipe for Android and iOS devices, where other companies harvest the money.

Biddle also claimed Intel were chock-full of “bruisers”, in the sense that the company’s staff would be happy to fight its way into a market where they have zero percent market share.

Operators will indeed be happy if Intel can deliver them a turn-key approach to create their own app stores and ecosystems, but who says Intel won’t apply the thumbscrews later on? Chipzilla is, after all, not a benevolent entity, but one that’s interested in its bottom line.

An interesting product was being showcased by Telecom Italia, namely its Meego-based, Atom-powered telly-over-IP unit dubbed Cubovision. Cubovision combines a DVB-T decoder, pay-per-view and WebTV. Users can also upload content to an internal 500GB HDD. The GUI ran nice and swift, everything was utterly hassle-free, apart from a tad bit of buffer time for streaming a HD movie from a server in Italy

It remainds to be seen if Intel can entice more and more hardware partners to churn Meego out into various markets, especially tablets.

Nokia’s move to Windows Phone 7 was a major setback, and only time will tell if Intel can utilise its huge resources to recuperate, or if Meego will go down the yellow brick WiMAX route.

AMD’s John Taylor showed off Llano running on a prototype notebook with prototype drivers next to an Intel Sandybook and showed how its APU was far better in terms of graphics and had better wattage than its competitor, while admitting Sandybridge can’t be beaten if one has to work with Excel.

To cut it short, rather boring, if not sad. Sad indeed was AMD’s explaining it would take it until next year to scale Fusion down to processes that will allow the tech to be used in pancake-thin tablets, sans passive cooling with a vent.

Despite lagging in the tablet arena, Fusion is gaining traction in the netbook arena.

This certainly is a good thing for consumers, as they will be able to choose between various systems. If one is on the prowl for a capable netbook, a Zacate-powered unit is certainly an excellent option. Things will get even better as soon as Bobcat’s big brother Llano hits the market.